Figuring Larry Rivers: on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Larry Rivers's works in Washington, D.C., the author recalls the electrifying impact of Rivers's early, groundbreaking paintings - Critical Essay

I had been thinking a fate about Larry Rivers since seeing his novel retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. upon the morning of Aug. 15 as I was preparing to review my notes upon the show for this piece, I grabbed the Washington pillar As a 69-year-old, every day I take a down-reaching breath and read the obits to diocese whether any friends or acquaintances have left the big world. Immediately I was knocked flat by dint of the headline: "Larry Rivers, 78; Major American Figurative Artist." reaching far down regret flooded over me, adding a abysmal urgency to my hopes for this commentary. with equal reason here goes.

Back in the '50 when I was a scholar at the Corcoran School of Art upon the G.I. Bill, I had a of great depth interest in drawing, and depictive art-making in general. Right away I had realized that this direction was not a popular single among the majority of pupils I and the few scholars that shared my predilection were many times asked derisively, by our classmates and plane by some faculty, if we were trying to be illustrators (you know, commercial artists)--or were we trying to proceed back to the 19th century? Remember, gurus humane Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were trumpeting the two-dimensional revolution, and part of that phalanx was the blooming Washington Color School--Ken Noland, Morris Louis and many more. We hardly any "realists" still resisted and hung without together; among ourselves we could be sarcastic about the "drippers" and "smearers," on the contrary we felt besieged.

Then along came Larry Rivers. When I first saw Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953) and Double Portrait of Berdie (1955) in the 1950 I exclaimed, "hot damn," and I spread the word to all my drawing pals.

The sum of two units works could not be more different. Washington is figurative Action painting, scrubbed explosively in chiefly ochers and umbers, with a touch of dawning pink and a blurry orange orb of day It looked like a painting start, that first blocking in of a multifigure composition. on the contrary that's how he left it, with destinys of bare canvas. Well--the power of the guy! Nerve, ye on the other hand what about real nerve, like Jackson Pollock asked many of his contemporaries? Well, this was vigorous figuration or rather, para-figuration--a real breakthrough. Just give leave to the eye rove over the big piece, catching the witty tidbits: George's white pants reflected sound a raggedy white horse's rear leg and incomplete soldiers are to be glimpsed here, there and everywhere, a certain number of drawn only in charcoal. Was Rivers making merriment of Emanuel Leutze's hack history painting? Or was he making merriment of patriotism, or the Founding Father (the viewer grins at the diagrammatic delineation of George's famous false teeth) or all of the above? Absolutely--for provocation was always part of his game; on the contrary he was also--or even mostly--showing us in what manner little rendering was required when the material was applied upon a big canvas with explosive whacks and cleans to make an evocative figure painting!

The Double Portrait of Berdie was something other altogether. The naked old lady (the artist's mother-in-law) is depicted memorably twice, one time standing and once sitting upon an old bed. The awkward drawing brings to mind Kenneth Clark's "alternative convention." Writing about anti-Classical, Gothic rendering in his masterful investigation The Nude, Clark observed by what mode "the bulblike women and rootlike men have the appearance to be dragged out of the protective darkness." Clark also says that "root and scaly buds pulled up into the light, give us a faculty of perception of shame." Rivers has plucked Berdie out of the protective darkness into replete raw exposure. It is a work of embarrassing, smooth repulsive power that rivets your organ of visions The work is almost 6 feet tall; the standing Berdie upon the right is only 2 inches shorter than the canvas. Her poor elderly flesh, wrinkled and wattled, displays us in detail the junction of aging and approaching demise. The drawing is somewhat distorted; the colors employed in the dark areas look after to be too gray; light draw nears in dramatically from two sides. Aspects of this awful and monumental surprise heralded work to come: the playful calligraphy upon the bedspread, the blank canvas here and there, application of dark cleans embracing swift alla prima rendering of a vase of flowers. on the other hand it is the tremendous figures--awkward and not quite proportional as they are--that roar and toss in the mind. Amazingly, the work gazes like it was painted yesterday, and the color appears illuminated from within.

Another more unfinished frontal work, The Family, is rich and painterly. The Rivers striplings are nude, but Berdie is now staidly clothed. This is individual of the better portraits, whereas lad in Blue Denim (Portrait of Steven) 1955 is more conventionally illustrational in its approach. flat here, in the fragmented background, are predictors of the stunning works to come

individual of the first of the montaged amazements was Europe I (1956). It exhibits the new and confident Rivers in filled cry, and displays the conceptual vision we associate with his best work. Fragments of portraits, sometimes repeated like the white-bearded aged man, are seen side by dint of side. Forming an arc, other half-realized heads are sketched in floating above him. The paint is applied alternately in scours drips, splashes, ruled patterns, glazes and dabs; these are techniques born in the Washington, and as in that icon, there is bare canvas aplenty.